Monday, January 10, 2011

Why I love Free Rice!


Free Rice is an amazing site that is free for everyone and helps people in need. Free Rice is a non-profit organization run by the United Nations World Food Program. Their website, FreeRice.com, says they have two goals:

1. Provide education to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

For every question a person gets correct, the site donates 10 grains of rice through the World Food Program to help end world hunger. They have different categories to test student knowledge. They have Art, Chemistry, Foreign Language (French, German, Italian and Spanish), Math (Pre-Algebra and the Multiplication Table), Geography and Language Arts. This is a great thing for students to do at home instead of staring at Facebook or playing mindless computer games. Kids can form groups and see their rankings compared to other groups around the world.

Free Rice could be set up to have different classes in the same building as a group and they could compete against each other over a set amount of time with the class with the most grain accumulated winning a prize. This could work had as a great school fundraiser where students can compete, help others in need and, most of all, reinforce basic concepts in various subjects.

1 comment:

  1. So I haven't played with the new Free Rice since they've changed it up a bit. However, I can say that my kids LOVED it last year!

    In the midst of preparing for their first ever standardized test (California Achievement Test), I thought we should do some "fun" vocabulary activities...Little did I know that when I would introduce the site to them (the same week of the Haiti earthquake), they would be compelled to work their hardest to help feed people across the world and not just consider it a game. The link to find out how the game helps feed people made some of my students cry. Mind you, many of my students only have the free breakfast and lunch at school because of their own poverty. But something stirred in them and they wanted to work as hard as they could at their vocabulary in order to help those in need.

    Thanks for reminding me of the power of this site. It's that time of year again and studying has commenced, so maybe I will pull Free Rice back out and challenge a whole new set of students to help feed those who need it most!

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